Monaco immigrant Sir Jim Ratcliffe is like the bigoted pub bore we should all ignore

Jim Ratcliffe says that Britain has been “colonised by immigrants”. Some say the language he uses is offensive, but that he’s “sort of basically right”. Well, he isn’t, he’s wrong.

The truth is that, post-Brexit, a Brexit he heartily endorsed by the way, the much-diminished UK is being treated like a vassal state. Not by the bureaucrats in Brussels, who we had a good day over, but by Trump’s America bullying us on trade, on defence and on immigration policy; and, more covertly, by Moscow, through its insidious manipulation of our politics.

It is American politicians, all of a sudden, who are telling the British that our capital city is a hellhole, our multicultural society is a disaster and that we face “civilisational erasure”. It’s the Russians who like to occupy our nearest neighbours and dominate the European continent, including the UK. If Ratcliffe wants to resist colonisation, he’s got the wrong targets.

The generations of people who have come to work here, whether in the NHS, in schools, on the buses and the building sites, the chicken shops and the nail bars or studying at the university, are, whatever else, not our colonial masters. The “foreign” consultant who supervised my medical treatment told me what to do in my own best interest; he is not my colonial overlord. A colonial power is a foreign power that takes over the government of another state or territory. Like Russia in Ukraine or America in Venezuela (plus Greenland, Gaza and Canada if they were allowed to).

So it’s not that Ratcliffe’s language is simply wrong in its tone, but wrong, full stop. We are not being colonised, nor invaded. We are richer in every way thanks to immigration. Immigrants are grafters. They are indeed of “fighting age” as the fascists say, but more to the point, of “working age” – or would be, if we actually allowed the asylum seekers to work and pay for their accommodation. Immigrants built America and Australia, and they have certainly contributed to Britain over the centuries.

In recent decades, there has been an unprecedented number of people coming to the UK, but they are not the cause of our problems; they are part of the answer. We’ve had housing crises and crime waves countless times in our history when there was little or no immigration. As a national phenomenon, high rents and prices are a supply problem.

So yes, there have been many millions of people – Ratcliffe got his numbers muddled, but we needn’t dwell on that – who’ve arrived in the UK, the vast majority legally. None of them “rules” over us, because we are a democracy and they have the same vote as anyone else. The numbers are much higher than they have been because we need them to keep the economy growing.

They do not take out more than they put in, any more or less, than people born here who also work hard. They contribute to economic growth, and their contribution is represented by the wages they earn and the profits their businesses make. They are not all liars, thieves, rapists and lazy. They pay their taxes, receive benefits and obey the law the same as anyone else, and if they don’t, they should be dealt with accordingly.

The main group of people who tend to enjoy better treatment from the tax system than the rest are those who can afford to exploit it – billionaires such as Ratcliffe, in fact. I don’t blame him personally for minimising his tax bill, because that’s a rational act that all of us do. I do question why it is that one group enjoy such lucrative privileges from parking their wealth abroad, and yet still wield enormous economic power and influence in the UK with zero democratic accountability. That sounds a bit more like colonialism.

The thing I resent about Ratcliffe more than anything is that he, and some others like him, facilitated Britain’s international weakness by taking us out of the EU. That lost us our bargaining power and status in the world, and that makes us poorer, notwithstanding Trump’s modest tariff concessions (probably outweighed by his reneging on the tech agreement and ramping up the NHS drugs bill).

Brexit was supposed to unleash a wave of entrepreneurial energy from the likes of Ratcliffe, but instead, he is threatening to run down the substantial part of the British chemicals industry he owns. I also seem to recall that he once planned to build his own new Land Rover-style car, the Ineos Grenadier, in Wales. Well, it’s now made in Hambach, France, near the German border, almost a totem of the European Union’s unifying mission and symbol of its success. The irony!

He’s knocked off the British Land Rover’s looks (perfectly legally, I should add), and there is scarcely a British component in its sturdy chassis, being more or less a BMW SUV underneath. It’s a fine vehicle in some ways, but to me it feels just a little bit like the product of economic colonialism: pillaging another nation’s industrial heritage and removing it to enrich oneself, and creating not a single British manufacturing job. Not to mention the state of Manchester United. What sort of patriot does that?